


Remembrance of the Daleks Coda: Time Will Tell

by DBC_82



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Aftermath, Classic Who Companions Are Awesome, Consequences, Gen, Serial: s148 Remembrance of the Daleks, The Daleks - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:07:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27311647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DBC_82/pseuds/DBC_82
Summary: Did we do good? As the Doctor and Ace walk back to the Doctor they discuss the consequences of their actions on Earth in 1963, while the Doctor ponders his relationship with his greatest enemies.
Relationships: Seventh Doctor & Ace McShane
Kudos: 7





	Remembrance of the Daleks Coda: Time Will Tell

With a deliberately light step the Doctor trod the path that led through the graveyard, Ace's arm linked companionably but distantly through his own. The woman from Perivale kept her eyes downcast as the low sun glittered off the badges on her jacket. He took a deep breath, the air around him was cool and damp with the promise of future precipitation and flavoured with the very specific bouquet of hydrocarbons and pollutants that he'd come to associate with mid to late twentieth century Earth. He was aware that somewhere beneath his feet were the resting places of all those lives he'd failed to save and he wondered again why it was he was so intent on trying to aid a species that seemed pre-destined to destroy itself.

As they walked away from the church he turned his attention to the organ music and the voices echoing across the graveyard behind them. Above the gentle wind he could hear the whisper of a hymn and he nodded to himself and smiled. 'The Lord is My Shepherd' he said softly. A memory came upon him of helping Bach with the original arrangement of 'Der Herr Ist Mein Gertreur Hirt'. As this memory and a thousand other thoughts flickered across his mind he took the time to idle over the question Ace had asked him that he'd entirely failed to adequately answer.

Did we do good? he thought.

I scorched an entire solar system, he thought to himself. I burned Skaro as utterly and completely as though it were an ant hill and I were the one holding the magnifying glass and I justified that action because I thought that that was what was necessary. Not right, he thought, but necessary to defeat the Daleks and to defeat Davros.

He remembered standing on the wastelands of Skaro in amongst a tangle of barbed wire and discarded weaponry, steeped in that same graveyard stench that always seemed to accompany conflict no matter where it was in the universe. Their mission on Skaro back in his fourth lifetime had been at the Time Lords behest but also the snare of a trap so long in the making that had Susan ever even suspected it she would never have left with him in the first place.

He'd failed in his mission of course, though in his own inimicable way he'd liked to think that he'd succeeded also. The universe had changed around him in that moment where he'd knelt in the squalor of the Kaled bunker, holding a wire in each hand and openly weighing the repercussions of his actions. He wondered if it was his intervention in Dalek history that had resulted in Davros's survival? Perhaps it was some paranoia as a result of his attempts to alter the future that had meant Davros escaped his extermination, instead of dying in the bunker beneath the Kaled dome as history had intended. Certainly the Doctor now remembered two separate versions of the Dalek's history, one without their mad, gibbering husk of a creator and one with, and he he wondered what other dangerous wheels had been set in motion on that fateful day on Skaro. He'd faced the Daleks so many times and won that their history was becoming dangerously close to unravelling, yet despite his best attempts they'd always survived. Even in his hubris he knew he'd never, ever truly defeat the Daleks. They were monsters, the creatures that lurked in the shadows under beds and which festered and multiplied in the gaps behind sofas. Monsters could only ever be kept at bay but never utterly defeated.

There would always be Daleks, just as there would always be the Doctor.

The grass crunched beneath his feet with the satisfaction of an early frost, despite the brilliant winter sunshine and he felt the chill wind through his coat. Despite the relatively early hour in the day the Doctor was relieved to see the sun sinking over the horizon, an example of spatio-temporal adjustment in all its glory. The Omega device had been playing havoc with the situational physics of local space-time and for the lives of him he couldn't understand why nobody had noticed that it'd still been light at six o'clock on a November evening. Though they'd all had more pressing matters to hand at the time, he had to concede.

He looked to his companion by his side and without saying anything Ace pulled her jacket tighter around her. He knew that a question was looming. Those brown eyes, so wounded and so full of pain. Losing Mike had been a blow. Losing Mike and knowing he'd been a traitor even more so. Eventually she spoke.

'The little girl, the one I found in Mike's house who'd been used by the Daleks. What'll happen to her?'

The Doctor smiled. Always the innocents, he thought.

'She's safe now, that's the most important thing. She'll be reunited with her parents if they're alive.' he said. 'She'll remember nothing and go on to lead a full and happy life, only occasionally troubled by dark dreams and terrible nightmares, of which she'll have no understanding upon waking. She'll live and die as she must.'

'And what if her parents aren't alive?'

'I don't know,' the Doctor said solemnly, 'But I'm sure she'll be looked after.'

He shuddered internally and hoped that he was right, though the reality was that any kind of mental health care in their current decade was limited at best and harmful at worst. A life spent in dilapidated hospitals or quasi-Victorian institutions, alone but for the thunder and blood of alien battles drumming away inside her subconscious forever. Of course there were places he could have taken her to for help, the Medi-goths of Nazarius IV or the Sisterhood of the Eternal Hippocratic Oath on the Perpetual Archipelago, though to risk interfering any further was impossible. The unnamed girl would have to take her own chances here in this place, just as he had done. He made a mental note to look in on her in a couple of years, filed it away under Business, Unfinished and closed that particular and uncomfortable door. Empathy was all very well, he thought, but if he stopped to mourn every unavoidable casualty he'd drown from all the tears.

'Good,' Ace said finally. 'I wouldn't want her to suffer.'

The Doctor both winced and smiled on the inside, where it wouldn't show. Humans, he thought fondly.

'And what about the Daleks?' she asked.

'What do you mean?'

'Well you put the kibosh on their time controller, I thought you didn't want to lumber Earth with a load of desperate Daleks?'

'And so I didn't. Fortunately the majority of the disparate factions eliminated each other in the ground battle and those that were aligned with the Emperor were destroyed along with the mothership.'

'Are they gone?'

'The Imperium was destroyed along with Skaro's system...' He thought suddenly of all those Daleks screaming out in rage as their cities melted like candle wax and their planet boiled. 'But no, unfortunately they're not gone. Though I did ensure that no word was able to reach the Renegade Council of what had transpired on Earth. They'll know that Skaro was destroyed of course but they'll never know exactly how.' He smiled grimly, 'I imagine it'll drive them mad.'

Ace frowned and he realised that there was a question left unsaid that he was deliberately avoiding answering.

'There was one Dalek left on Earth, the Supreme Dalek....' he said. The Doctor thought back on the many and varied versions of his nemesis that he'd encountered on a dozen different worlds. He realised suddenly what he'd long suspected, that they were all one and the same, the same malevolence glaring out of that eye stalk no matter where he happened to find himself in space and time. The Renegade Council would have to be dealt with of course, though those plans could wait for another day.

'What happened to him?' Ace asked.

“Him?”

'Oh come on, you're not trying to tell me that Daleks are female? Do me a favour!'

'Let's just say I demonstrated the futility of any and all of _its_ future endeavours, taking into consideration _its_ current predicament. The conversation then took a terminal bent.'

Ace whistled softly. 'So you talked it to death?' Blimey Professor, remind me never to start another argument with you about who's turn it is to make the cocoa.'

The Doctor smiled. Facing down his nemesis again had brought him no particular satisfaction but he did so detest loose ends.

'How do you think we fared?' he asked.

'I don't know. The bad guys got bazooka'd but...?'

'Go on...?'

'Well we won I guess but a lot of good people died. Not just Mike... Bellos and Faringdon. and..'

Her voice trailed off and the Doctor looked downcast. Why did it always come down to this? In all his battles be it Ace or Tegan or Sarah Jane who fought by his side, there was always a cost and it was always witnessed. He reached for a memory of any of the fallen; a hurried conversation perhaps or a photo of a child kept safe in a kitbag but he found nothing.

'I'm sorry, I didn't get a chance to know them.'

'Too busy playing games.'

'Who were they?' he asked.

'People! Soldiers who ended up caught in the middle of an alien civil war that no one even knows about.'

The Doctor thought quickly, timing was everything at this juncture. She understands, he thought, she knows about the players and the pawns and she sees the injustice already. To conceal or to reveal? A foot wrong now could set his plans back years.

'I'm sorry that I couldn't save them, truly I am. Even I'm not all powerful and I can't save the lives of everyone who steps across my path. Sometimes terror arrives for tea and it doesn't wait to be invited before entering. I owe a debt to history.'

Ace pulled away and turned to face him, her face set in a mask of pain and confusion.

'History can go to hell. None of this would have happened if you hadn't lured the Daleks here with the Hand of Omega would it?'

'It's not that simple,' the Doctor countered.

'Then make it simple.'

Here goes nothing, he thought.

'Look around you. This city has existed for over five thousand years and it will stand in some form for millennia on a thousand different planets. I stood and watched as the Romans laid the first bridge over the Thames and I'll stand by and watch as Dalek saucers reduce the city to rubble two hundred years from now. This city where you'll be born a few short years from now and which seems so permanent is just a tiny fragment of a greater pattern that stretchs across the entire universe. When I told you the Daleks wouldn't risk destabilising history by destroying the Earth that's what I meant.'

Surprised Ace turned and contemplated the drab buildings and grey skies of the city in which she'd be born.

'What do you mean?' she said. 'What does that have to do with anything?'

'What I mean is that you and I serve at the pleasure of time herself! We wander in the fourth dimension bound by consequence if not gravity. Yes I led the Daleks here to what I hoped was an ending of sorts because they are evil, but within a thousand years Earth will have carved out an Empire all of its own, out amongst the stars, multiplying indomitably and making all the same mistakes that originated here, in this city. Humanity will become the invading monsters, destroying and consuming as they see fit, safe and secure in their ivory Overcities.'

'Do you mean humanity is as bad as the Daleks?'

'No, no of course not, the Daleks are an evil all unto themselves and humanity has always had the choice to be better.'

Ace shook her head. 'So why not stop them as well? End the Earth Empire and help the monsters defeat the humans?'

'I could stop them of course, but I owe it to history not to interfere. It's simply a matter of knowing what you can change and what you can't and learning to live with the consequences, and trust me when you've lived as long as I have that's no laughing matter.'

Ace released her grip and folded in on herself. The Doctor paused before putting a tentative arm around her shoulder. As much as he could see the conversation was troubling her he decided to press his advantage.

'What I'm trying to explain is that history demands sacrifice. When I set out travelling all those years ago I never imagined I'd encounter an evil on such a scale as the Daleks, but when I did, I seized the opportunity to lead them to an end. I did what I thought was right, like I always do but even I, though I walk through the battlefields of eternity, cannot save all the soldiers.'

The Doctor leaned heavily on his umbrella and cautiously watched Ace biting her lip as she took the first steps towards a greater awareness of her role in universal affairs. The question that followed was as welcome as it was unexpected.

'So it's not all fixed except some of it is? We can't save everyone but we can try?'

'We must always try,' he said quietly . 'That's all there is.'

He waited as Ace silently considered his answers.

'You still haven't properly explained why you brought the Daleks to the unswinging Sixties of all places?'

The Doctor shrugged and decided to tell the truth. 'It was where I ended up when I ran away from Gallifrey.'

Ace nodded sagely, 'All those deaths... It's all just random in the end isn't it professor?'

Instead of answering immediately he took his bearings as they reached the edge of the graveyard. Somewhere in the distance he could sense the TARDIS waiting for them in the alley in which they'd landed. He could still hear the sound of reverential murmuring coming from the church some distance behind them but also the sound of traffic, the noise of aeroplanes flying overhead and worms burrowing through the earth. He noted the air pressure, wind speed and ambient temperature and reasoned whether or not it was time to button up his jacket. Somewhere deep inside one of his pockets was a thermos of coffee and he calculated the odds that he could extract it without dislodging the endless paraphernalia that seemed to accumulate inside his coat.

'Yes, I suppose it is,' he said eventually.

Ace smiled a sad but satisfied smile and the Doctor gripped her arm as they stepped out into the road.

Take that Fenric, he thought.


End file.
